Oxidizer News

I've started blogging Oxidizer specific suff at Rampant Mac The idea is that Scott's site becomes a 'Landing Pad' of all stuff Oxidizer. There's a forum too where you can get in touch with me.

Look out for a Oxidzer 0.4.2 release soon. This has a major flam3 bug fix in. 

Dave

Help!!!

I started work on a Help/Tutorial thing. It's early days and I really should be testing pG 1.7 before I release it, so it is definately a work in progress. C&Cs welcome.

http://oxidizer.sourceforge.net/OxidizerHelp

Still here...

So what have I been up to recently...
Development wise I not done a lot, initially due to be being busy at work, but now due to be not being busy at work.

Alright, I know...

Around 2 months ago my job was put under threat of redundancy. As the company in question was expecting to make over 100 people redundant in one foul they legally have to go through a 90 day consultancy period before formally giving notice. That day is still a month away, but I now know that I will definitely been amongst those 100 people. The whole thing has pretty much sapped any enthusiasm I have for coding especially the coupled with the flam3 code breakage (more below).

There as been some progress however...

I have rewritten the planetGenesis code that handles the links between components so now a user can drag a join over a component and then release it, inserting the component in the middle of the join.

I've also introduced a new type of component, a Post Processing component, this takes a complete terrain and processes it further. No actual useful components for it
yet though although I do have a Erosion component that shows some promise.

pG has had a lot more changes though as the project has gained a new developer, Sid Datta. He has added a persistent dialogue panel on the right of pG screen, and selected components are now highlighted.

So what about Oxidizer? I've took a break from Oxidizer since, as mentioned above, recent changes to the flam3 library have borked it. It’s to do with pthreads in a library, Cocoa event handling and memory management and how none of them work together very well. I may back out a version of flam3 and backport the variation changes to get a release out and give me some more time, and them think about
either forking or shelling out to flam3 instead of compiling in the code.

Dave

planetGenesis

I've been a little quite recently, this was due to a number of things.

I've been playing with the Terragen 2 Technical Preview

I bust my typing finger playing football (the type you play with a ball and feet).

So I've been giving my finger a rest.

I've also been giving Oxidizer a rest too, and had a play with planetGenesis instead. This has lead to the first release for 14 months...hoo-rah.

So the new bits are...

The Noise Menu has been split into differrent noise types.

New Noises
Worley noises now have a new distance metric, QuasiEuclidean.
There's a new Worley noise, BiasedWorley.
LinearSandDunes is a new noise that creates linear sand dunes.

New Combiners
- WarpX, WarpY and WarpZ.
These take the value generated by the left hand side noise and add it to
either the X, Y or Z co-ordinate feed to the right hand side noise.

Oxidizer has seen some action, it's been updated to the latest flam3 version, and there's also a start of lua scripting. All these are only available from CVS, and the lua scripting is very limited at the moment.

More yummy stuff

Just to bring you up to date with the Gene Pool CVS check in's.

The Gene Pool now has a progress window which so keeps you informed of which genomes are breeding and how.

One or to little bug fixes to stop the breeding crashing.

There's a button to toggle the button state.

Finally there's an icon for Gene Pool on the tool bar.

For those who have used a previous version, you'll may need the new icon via the Customise Tool bar option. it should be a default button for new users.

A Spring Clean.

Hopefully the blog's still here :-)

I decided that Oxidizer's main Nib file was getting a bit full, so I've moved the GenePool Nib Stuff into a new

Nib file. While I was at it I've also moved the GenePool source into its own sub folder.

The upshot of this is that any one following the CVS will have to make sure they update using

cvs -z3 update -dP

to make sure they get the new folders.

Let me know if there are any issues.

Dave